Boarding is leaving money behind

Holiday flights this year are the most expensive in a decade, and Hopper says travelers "have begun to book trips weeks earlier than they have historically" to get ahead of the prices, per its 2026 holiday travel outlook. A lot of those travelers own a dog, and the dog needs a room too.

At the top of the market, that room has a 6-month wait. Canyon View Ranch in Topanga, California, boards up to 60 dogs and keeps a waiting list of 6 months or longer, according to an LA Times profile in August. It charges $100 a night and $120 over the holidays, with no discount for a second dog.

That's a 20% premium for the busiest nights of the year, and Canyon View turns out to be the exception.

To see whether the businesses that run out of rooms also charge more for them, we went through the websites of 1,513 daycare and boarding facilities across 31 US metros, collecting posted nightly rates, holiday pricing and booking rules. Only 114 of them, about 1 in 13, list any kind of holiday price, and the typical surcharge is $10 a night.

No one in the industry publishes occupancy, so the best signal is what facilities tell their own customers.

We pulled a small sample of public Facebook and Instagram posts from US daycare and boarding facilities about holiday availability. 27 said Thanksgiving was already full or waitlisted, 17 said the same about Christmas, and the median post went up 45 days before the holiday.

The early ones came in summer. A K9 Resorts in Rogers, Arkansas, said on August 6th that its luxury suites were "already over halfway booked for both Thanksgiving and Christmas." Tale of the Dog in Poway, California, posted "FULLY BOOKED FOR Thanksgiving & Christmas" on August 27th, and Desert Paws in Mesa, Arizona, had waitlists for both by mid-September.

By October the posts were everywhere. North Acres Kennel in Springfield, Missouri, was full with a waitlist for Thanksgiving on the 9th. The Bark Park in Sacramento sold out its private suites on the 15th, Common Dog in Everett, Massachusetts, began waitlisting Thanksgiving on the 16th, and Toby Town in Richmond, Virginia, went "Waitlist Only" for Christmas on the 18th.

Owners feel it from the other side. Last October, a dog owner in Pleasant View, Tennessee, asked her town's Facebook group for help because her regular boarding spot was "already fully booked" for Christmas break.

She was asking 64 days before Christmas, which makes our 45-day median look generous.

Full isn't universal, though. A survey of more than 450 boarding owners by IBPSA, The Dog Gurus and PocketSuite sorted operators into four groups, and in the second-weakest group, "even during peak seasons, nearly half aren't fully booked."

Among the 114 facilities that publish holiday pricing, most simply add a flat fee to every night that falls in a holiday window. That fee runs from $5 to $25, and the median is $10, which works out to about 13% on top of the regular rate. The rest list a separate, higher holiday rate.

Goose, which makes management and revenue software for pet care businesses, found almost the same thing in its own review of thousands of facility websites. Only 7.3% of facilities with listed prices charge a peak surcharge, at an average of $8.98 a day.

Canyon View's $20 holiday bump is a 20% premium, and the sitters on Rover land in the same place. Rover tells sitters, whether they board dogs at their own home or stay at yours, that holiday rates generally run 10% to 20% above their standard price. Its city price pages show a holiday rate about 20% higher than the average night in all 27 metros where it publishes both, like $74.77 against $61.70 in Boston.

So the person staying in your guest room over Christmas probably charges a bigger holiday premium than the facility with 60 runs and a waitlist.

Some facilities sell the missing premium as a feature. A Hounds Town outside Atlanta told customers on October 18th that Thanksgiving spots were filling fast, with "NO HOLIDAY PREMIUMS" and a 1-night deposit to hold the room.

Only 593 of the 1,513 facilities we reviewed, or 39%, list a nightly boarding rate anywhere on their website. The rest ask you to call, fill out a form or log into a booking portal. Among those that do post, the median night is $58.

Franchise locations post more. 57% of Camp Bow Wow, Dogtopia, Hounds Town and other franchise locations list a nightly rate, against 36% of independents, and they're nearly twice as likely to list holiday pricing (11.7% vs 6.9%). The franchisor's template puts the rate card on the website, and it doesn't make them pricier, since the median posted night is $58 at franchises and $55 at independents.

Where a facility sits moves the price far more than the calendar does. The median posted night is $99.50 in New York and $97.50 in San Francisco, more than double the $45 in Indianapolis and $43 in St. Louis.

What facilities post instead are rules that protect their holiday rooms:

Those rules lock in the booking, and the rate for that booking stays where it sits the rest of the year.

We also pulled historic 2019 rates for 113 of these facilities in 28 metros. Their median night went from $43 to $56, and the typical facility raised its price 33%.

That's slightly ahead of overall inflation over the same period (about 30%) and well behind the federal price index for pet services like boarding and grooming (about 43%).

The increases are also getting smaller. In 2022, 65% of the facilities we could track raised their rate, by 7% on average. This year 38% did, by 2.3%.

Almost nobody cuts, either. In no year since 2019 did more than about 1% of these facilities lower their rate.

The people doing the work got a bigger raise. The median animal caretaker earned $11.91 an hour in 2019 and $17.00 in May 2025, up 43%.

That matters because labor is the biggest bill in the building. Owners in the PocketSuite survey named labor costs "the single greatest concern across the board," and PocketSuite puts labor at about 52% of revenue for facilities doing $150K to $500K a year.

Some operators are now tying price increases directly to pay. A Camp Bow Wow in Cary, North Carolina, told customers to "lock in your holiday boarding now" before prices change on November 1st. When a customer asked about the new price list, the location answered that boarding is going to $60, about 3%, "so we can increase our employee compensation by the same amount."

Wag'N Tails Pet Resort in Lansing, Michigan, is raising boarding from $48 to $51 a night on December 1st and ties it to the state minimum wage moving from $13.78 to $15.00.

Camp Bow Wow's latest franchise disclosure shows how thin the gap is between a good location and a bad one. The average location grossed $1.09M last year at a 14.4% EBITDA margin. The top quarter averaged $1.48M at 23.4%, and the bottom quarter averaged $781K and lost money, at minus 0.6%.

In a business with a fixed number of runs and a labor bill that rises every year, the nights that sell out anyway are the easiest place to find that margin. And at sale, buyers paid an average of 4.4x the owner's yearly cash flow for daycare and boarding businesses sold on BizBuySell in 2025, so every extra dollar of profit counts several times over.

So why do so few charge for it?

If I had to guess, it's the regulars. In the PocketSuite survey, about a third of owners said 75% to 89% of their monthly revenue comes from repeat customers. A family that boards 10 times a year and gets hit with a surcharge at Christmas is a family that might start calling the sitter down the street.

A 3-night minimum or a deposit protects the calendar without touching the rate a regular sees, which may be why owners reach for rules before price.

The facilities that post "fully booked" in August have already shown they can charge more for Christmas, and most are choosing not to.